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Capital of Lydia, in Asia Minor
(area 7).
Sardis was the city of residence of Croesus, the Lydian king of the VIth
century B. C. (he reigned from 561 to his death in 546), whose story is told
by Herodotus in the first book of his Histories
(Histories,
I, 6-94). Lydia at the time was a very rich country, owing in particular
to the gold of the Tmolus mountains that was carried down under the form of
gold dust by the Pactolus river flowing through Sardis (Histories,
I, 93 and Histories,
V, 101). Herodotus depicts the court of
Croesus as a brilliant place visited by all the Wise Men of Greece who lived
in that time and tells the story of the visit of Solon
there and his contempt for Croesus' wealth (Histories,
I, 29-33).
Based on Herodotus' account, Sardis is linked
in more than one way to the later history of Athens
and Greece. By attacking Cyrus when he felt
his kingdom in danger in the face of Persian expansion, and being defeated by
him (Sardis was taken by Cyrus in 546, Histories,
I, 79-84), Croesus led to the subjection of the Ionian
cities he had himself earlier subjected, such as Miletus,
to the dominion of Persia : eventually, Lydia became,
under Darius, one of the satrapies of the Persian
Empire and Sardis the city of residence of the Satrap of that province. And
it is the uprising of the Ionian cities in 498
under the leadership of Aristagoras of Miletus, and
the help it received from Athens and Eretria,
leading to the destruction of Sardis by fire at the hands of the rebels that
same year which was seen by many, starting with Herodotus,
as the cause of the Persian Wars (Plato echoes this view
at Menexenus,
240a, as might be expected in a dialogue that mimics the common view of
writers of funeral orations at the time).Herodotus puts the origin of Croesus' dynasty
as kings of Lydia in a certain Gyges and tells
us, at the very start of his Histories, the story of how that Gyges usurped
power over Candaules (probably sometime in the early part of the VIIth century
B. C.) (Histories,
I, 7-14). Plato has Glaucon, in the 2nd book of the
Republic (Republic,
II, 359c-360b and see my comments
on that section) tell us a slightly different story of that Gyges (there is
no mention in Herodotus of a "ring of Gyges",
which is at the heart of Glaucon's version). We may wonder if Plato didn't have
some definite intention in the back of his mind in starting his criticism of
the commonly held notion of justice with the same story that starts Herodotus'
history of the Persian Wars, which were at the origin of the Athenian Empire
and of the pretense of Athens, the winner of Marathon,
to rule all of Greece.

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